Reality Hunger (3 page)

The earliest uses of writing were list-making and account-keeping.

In 450 b.c., Bacchylides wrote, “One author pilfers the best of another and calls it tradition.”

In the second century b.c., Terence said, “There’s nothing to say that hasn’t been said before.”

Storytelling can be traced back to Hindu sacred writings, known as the Vedas, from around 1400 b.c.

Homer’s
Iliad
and
Odyssey
, c. 800 b.c., are epics told in verse—not novels but nonetheless stories.

The aphorism is one of the earliest literary forms—the residue of complex thoughts filtered down to a single metaphor. By the second millennium b.c., in Sumer, aphorisms appeared together in anthologies, collections of sayings that were copied for noblemen, priests, and kings. These lists were then catalogued by theme: “Honesty,” “Friendship,” “Death.” When read together, these collections of sayings could be said to make a general argument on their common themes, or at least shed some light somewhere, or maybe simply obsess about a topic until a little dent has been made in the huge idea they all pondered. “Love.” Via editing and collage, the form germinated into longer, more complex, more sustained, and more sophisticated essayings. The Hebrew wisdom of Ecclesiastes is essentially a collection of aphorisms, as are Confucius’s religious musings and Heraclitus’s fragments. These extended aphorisms eventually crossed the border into essay: the diaries of Sei Shônagon, Anne Bradstreet’s letters, Kafka’s notebooks, Pound’s criticism.

The earliest manuscript of the Old Testament dates to 150 b.c. Parts of the Bible incorporate “real things” into the text. The laws that have come to make up Mosaic Law, for instance, were undoubtedly real laws before they became canonical. There are bits of song and folk poetry scattered throughout the Old Testament that seem to have had a life independent of scripture. The Samson stories were probably folktales that the Judges storyteller worked into his thesis.

It is out of the madness of God, in the Old Testament, that there emerges what we, now, would recognize as the “real”; his perceived insanity is its very precondition.

The New Testament renders, sometimes artistically and often from competing points of view, events that supposedly really happened. The Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were written 40 to 110 years after the events in question.

In his preface to
The History of the Peloponnesian War
, Thucydides acknowledges that he “found it impossible to remember the exact wording of speeches. Hence I have made each orator speak as, in my opinion, he would have done in the circumstances, but keeping as close as I could to the train of thought that guided his actual speech.”

Plutarch sometimes bulleted his essays with as many as a hundred numbered sections, eschewing narrative completely and simply listing. His essay “Sayings by Spartan Women” itemizes quotations from unknown Spartan mothers, wives, daughters, and widows on a variety of topics without any transitional exposition or interpretation, or any suggestion whatsoever as to how we might read the text or even, for that matter, why.